The aim of the conference is to explore new and fruitful answers tothree central questions: What are novel predictions? Ought novelpredictions have more epistemic weight than mere accommodations? Cannovel predictions help us make headway in the scientific realism debate?We expect that the talks will cover one or more of the following relatedtopics, simplicity, unification, curve-fitting, approximate truth,inference to the best explanation, the no-miracles argument andscientific theory change.

We invite abstracts of up to 500 words on any of the above or closelyrelated topics. Please e-mail contributions to Ioannis Votsis (votsis@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de ). Make sure to include your fullname, institutional affiliation and e-mail address.

We hope to publish the proceedings of the conference in a reputablescientific journal. Upon completion of the conference, we will inviteparticipants to submit written-up versions of their talks. Submittedpapers will then be subjected to a peer-review process.

1 comment:

Thanks for your comments on the Otago project Eric. I must disagree with you, however, that our framework will run into trouble in 18th century. In fact, the terminology of the experimental philosophy is more prevalent in the 18th century and our research shows that the experimental philosophy was extended beyond natural philosophy into moral philosophy and even aesthetics. See, for example, the works of George Turnbull which are a good example of experimental moral philosophy. Furthermore, rather than the approach of Galileo, Huygens and Newton providing an exception, we argue that their mathematical natural philosophical method came to be seen as the preferred method of experimental philosophy. Boyle, Hooke and the early Royal Society practised experimental philosophy according to the method of Baconian natural history. But this only lasted until the 1690s when it began to be replaced by the Newtonian method. This is, in fact, the explanation of Newton’s common refrain ‘Natural philosophy is not natural history’. He himself had a large hand in the demise of the Baconian approach to experimental philosophy both through criticism and through his own positive alternative. Far from providing an exception to our framework, Newton is one of the central players!